DoDonPachi: SaiDaiOuJou - Xbox360 Arrange Shot 1cc (Xenia)

SDOJ was Cave's final original game they released in Japanese arcades back in 2011, its notorious for being one of the most difficult shoot em ups ever made. To this day no one has cleared the true last boss on Arcade Expert mode and its unlikely anyone will any time soon. SDOJ was ported the xbox360 where it is still the only real way to play it now days since the PCB will cost you around 4 grand and no one has dumped the game (dumps exist, but Cave has intercepted the devs behind MAME so that it does not get leaked as Cave still makes money off SDOJ in arcades). Maybe someday we can get a nice dump of it but for now it is stuck on the Xbox360. This run was done on one of the newer builds of Xenia, which is a 360 emulator. It runs pretty perfectly on my computer albeit with maybe 0.5 frames of extra input lag which for me is negligible.

This is not the regular Arcade mode but instead the Xbox360 exclusive arrange mode which has 3 difficulties (shot, laser, and expert. This was a shot run and while its the easiest, its very easy to get off route by stray bullets. Memorizing spawn locations of larger enemies was key here. The "Big Bee" boss has messed me up for months but i think finally got it down well enough. Hibachi and Inbachi (the two final bosses) are problems by themselves particularly Hibachi's fast 3rd attack (seen at 23:08) which could easily cost the whole run if you don't keep rhythm. Inbachi is significantly easier, and may in fact be the easiest boss in the whole game-- a nice little break from everything leading up to her.

360 Arrange mode lets you use 1 ship but you can select three options each corresponding to difficulty. Shot buffs your regular shot, Laser buffs your focus-laser and Expert buffs both but increases enemy bullets and speed. Instead of bombs you get a health bar seen at the bottom of the screen and each hit acts as an auto-bomb and drains some health. The way you recover health is by gaining yellow stars to increase your hyper level. Triggering a hyper (by using the bomb button), turns all stars green and collecting them recovers health. Triggering a hyper will increase your rank however which directly increases enemy bullet speed, The only way to decrease rank is to get hit so managing resources is the key to this mode. I purposely save a level 10 hyper for the stage 3 midboss even though it increases rank drastically. Stage 1 and 2 are probably 'free' in the run, but making sure i end up with that level 10 hyper by the stage 3 midboss did require perfect execution.

I find this mode pretty fun especially when the regular Arcade is so damn brutal. Maybe getting a Laser clear or even Expert clear is something i could accomplish in the near future. For now though, i'll go back to Arcade mode to get a proper clear.

SaiDaiOuJou is no joke, its the hardest shmup i have ever played but its crafted so beautifully and so cleverly that the 'solutions' to certain patterns have literally made me laugh out loud. Some real love was put into this game. What a way for Cave to go out.

https://youtu.be/oEyQKuT7MGk